I was certainly curious about the answer to that question, so I
clicked on the link. And as I did so, I also thought, "How
refreshing--a journalist who actually cares about writing stuff
that people want to read. Maybe we should hire him."

Alas, when I landed on the
column, I found that it was just a bait-and-switch--a
technique in which someone puts an interesting-sounding headline
on a boring article and makes the reader feel duped and annoyed
for clicking.

The column was indeed titled "Why Teachers Have Sex With Their
Students" (or something close), but then in the first sentence
the writer announced that the column was not actually about that
topic at all--that he had just titled it that because he thought
that would make people read it. And then he went off on one of
those snooty sermons about how pedestrian and base Internet
readers are for clicking on stories about topics like "Why
Teachers Have Sex With Their Students."

I've read enough of those that if I never read another one it
will be too soon.

But, still, hoping to learn why teachers have sex with their
students (I'm a parent, and as much as I never even want to
contemplate this topic, I also don't want to be in denial about
it), I pressed on until the end.

And Google instantly produced links to a bunch of articles on
this precise topic.

According to the first couple of articles (no, this was not
exhaustive research), here are some common reasons teachers have
sex with their students:

Love. In perhaps the most famous case of
a teacher having sex (and kids) with her student, 34-year-old
wife and mother Mary Kay Letourneau was
thrown in the slammer for the "child rape" of a 13-year old
student named Vili Fualaau. Letourneau was let out after 6
months, whereupon she was found in a car having sex with Vili
again. Letourneau was sent back to prison for many years. When
she got out, she married Vili, with whom, by that point, she
had had two kids. They sold the video rights to their wedding
for $750,000 and sold a book entitled, "Only One Crime--Love."
The book was published in France, not America.

Loneliness. According to
an article on Oprah's site, sometimes teachers who have sex
with their students are at a difficult place in their lives:
"An impending divorce helped push 27-year-old Pamela Rogers
into getting intimate with her 13-year-old student in 2004,
says Joan Schleicher, a Nashville forensic psychologist who
testified in court on her behalf. "She was demoralized and
feeling empty inside, and he was the one to whom she could turn
her attention." As the relationship progressed, Rogers (a
former homecoming queen now serving an eight-year sentence)
began, as many of these women do, to live in a world of
"magical thinking," Schleicher says. "And she responded to that
instead of the rules of society."

Lust. Again,
according to Oprah's site: "I've had cases where a teacher
starts out seeing a kid simply to tutor him, but soon they
begin talking about their personal lives and what music they
like, then they're listening to iPods together and texting each
other, and suddenly it's like a dating relationship," says
Robert J. Shoop, PhD, director of the Cargill Center for
Ethical Leadership at Kansas State University and author of
Sexual Exploitation in Schools.These teachers have a
poor concept of boundaries, so they don't recognize when
they've crossed the line into inappropriate behavior, says
Shoop. Even as police handcuffed her, Debra Lafave, the
23-year-old Florida teacher who had sex with a 14-year-old
student, admitted in an interview that she didn't feel she'd
committed a crime—"I was thinking of [myself] as a young girl
who just got caught with her boyfriend."

They themselves were sexually abused as kids or had
their minds otherwise warped. Again,
Oprah: "Such arrested development may result from having
been sexually abused themselves as children, says Larry Morris,
PhD, a Tucson-based forensic psychologist and author of
Dangerous Women: Why Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters Become
Stalkers, Molesters, and Murderers."But most of these
women come from conflict-ridden families where they didn't
learn healthy social skills. Many learned to get their
emotional needs—for love, attention, approval—met through
sexual behavior." Once they start teaching, if faced with some
kind of serious stressor (marital problems, for example) in
addition to the right child sitting in their class, it's not a
far leap to sex offender."

And then there are some more theories, advanced by writer David
Kupelian in this
article.

More time for unsupervised contact, thanks to both
parents working. Folks who hang out together
unsupervised are apparently more likely to have sex.

"Cell-phone technology, text messaging and e-mail
afford opportunities for teachers and students to communicate
privately that didn’t exist a generation ago." More
texting, apparently, leads to more sex.

"The explosion of hardcore pornography, especially
online, has resulted in the exposure of children to graphic
sexual images to a far greater degree than at any time in
history." More porn apparently leads to more sex.

Now, all of these reasons and theories, of course, seek to
explain the more socially acceptable form of teachers having sex
with students, which is women teachers having sex with
post-pubescent male students, some of whom apparently consider
the experience their "lucky day."

The other kind of sex with students--the kind perpetrated by
serial child-molesters, usually men, some of whom apparently go
into teaching as a way to get a steady flow of potential
victims--is a whole different discussion (and far more
horrifying).